Don't cop out on chance to save nature

Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 29 Jan 10;

It sounds simple, and the world should have been able to do it by now: reduce the destruction of nature and conserve large enough areas to serve as gene pools for the millions of species that make up the true infrastructure of life on Earth.

But as with climate change, commercial interests from fisheries to pharmaceuticals have hampered real action to halt the extinction of species, or at least replace outright plunder with sustainable use.

2010 is the United Nations Year of Biodiversity. As with the climate change conference in Copenhagen last month, various parties are girding themselves for battle ahead of a major environmental conference.

This time it's the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Biodiversity. It will be held in October in Nagoya, Japan.

In Johannesburg in 2002, the signatories to the Convention pledged to aim for a 'significant reduction' in the rate of biological diversity loss by 2010. But apart from a few scattered successes, that has not happened.

A major objective at Nagoya will be the adoption of an international protocol on 'access and benefit sharing' or ABS - an acronym the public will soon be hearing more of.

But many rich countries oppose an international legal framework for the use of biological resources. Poor countries - especially tropical nations rich in biodiversity - want to protect their resources but retain the right to exploit them.

The failure of the Copenhagen talks to deliver a binding agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions means there is now a greater need for a legal agreement on curbing biodiversity loss.

'If climate change is a problem, biodiversity is at least part of the solution,' says Mr Ahmed Djoghlaf, secretary-general of the Convention on Biodiversity, recently in Copenhagen.

'The loss of biodiversity is compounding the climate change agenda. The science and technology will not replace the forests, oceans, peatlands and wetlands. Nature is a major contributor to climate stabilisation. So it is our duty, it is a survival issue, to protect nature.'

Biodiversity is thus sandwiched between twin threats - human exploitation and climate change. Before the end of the century, around 30 per cent of all known species may disappear because of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said.

Some 1.9 million species have been catalogued, but it is estimated that the total number of species, excluding microbes, on Earth is between 20 million and 30 million.

Since the population explosion of modern humans, the rate of extinction of species is estimated to have increased to 20,000 to 30,000 species a year - a far greater rate than any since the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

The connection is inescapable: The data proves that the planet's sixth mass extinction episode is taking place under our 'stewardship'. Over the past century, the building blocks of our survival have been at first steadily, then rapidly, reduced.

Humans can eat around 3,000 plant species, but only around 20 provide more than 80 per cent of our food. Worldwide, around half our population depends on plant-based medicine for primary health care. Tropical forests remain an enormous and largely unknown repository of plants with potential medicinal value.

The surge in human population, and a consumption- and demand-driven economic model, has ravaged natural systems and depleted our food banks from land and sea. Mining, and the conversion of diverse natural ecosystems to industrial-scale agriculture, plantations, industry and urbanisation, has destroyed country-sized areas of previously productive ecosystems and the organisms that lived in them.

Mr Pavan Sukhdev, a former Deutsche Bank economist who now works for the UN Environment Programme, notes that when banks began losing their capital value in 2008-09, it made front-page headlines. But far greater, ongoing and more fundamentally critical losses in capital value in our natural ecosystems scarcely warrant an occasional report.

In recent memory, food and oil price shocks have underlined our vulnerability to our supply chain - not supermarket supply chains, but the supply chains of the natural ecosystem, the basis of life. Forests - which include grasslands, peat swamps and wetlands often dismissed by governments and corporations as of little use - are key components of that system.

The loss of forests alone is estimated to have been worth up to US$2 trillion to US$4.5 trillion (S$2.8 trillion to S$6.3 trillion) a year over the last 25 years, says Mr Sukhdev. Two of the worst deforesters are in this region - Indonesia and Malaysia.

Mr Djoghlaf says the aim for Nagoya is to have a new strategic plan and a new target for 2020. 'Each country will be called to integrate this new vision into their national priorities to make it effective, and they will also be asked to come up with their own national targets. The objective is to mainstream biodiversity into the economic sector.'

In the run-up to Nagoya, there are worrying similarities to the climate change talks. The draft of an agreement to protect the planet's biodiversity is huge and littered with square brackets marking points that are still contentious. And the real challenge remains that of stalling the juggernaut of destruction.

Again the multilateral, consensus-based decision-making mechanism of the UN will be put to the test, that it failed in Copenhagen. If it fails again, the only hope will lie in national, political and economic policies. Influential tropical countries like India, Brazil and South Africa may bear an even greater responsibility at Nagoya than at Copenhagen. Says Mr Djoghlaf: 'What is at stake is the capacity of the planet to carry its goods and services. So what is at stake is our lives.'